HellRaisers’ Nix complains over IeSF World Championship conditions

Alexander “Nix” Levin of HellRaisers’ Dota 2 squad is one of the players chosen by the Russian Esports Federation to represent their nation in the IeSF World Championship 2019. He recently took to Instagram to lament the poor conditions he and his team met in Seoul.

According to Nix, the venue is a LAN cafe with uncomfortably small tables and ridiculously outdated hardware. We’re talking 50Hz monitors with Pentium processors and cheap graphic cards in 2019. The teams had to simultaneously download and install the Dota 2 client, which took about 3 hours. Then, probably because the hardware is so old, the game kept crashing. They also didn’t have TeamSpeak or Discord for teammates to communicate with each other.

Sadly, it doesn’t end there. No food and drinks were provided for the teams, and with the tournament organizer absent, there weren’t any staff that could speak Russian or fluent English. Additionally, the Windows display language was Korean, and no managers were provided to the teams, making communication extremely hard.

For an international event by a global esports governing body, the whole affair sounds like a nightmare. A frustrated Nix says he just wants to run away, and he probably isn’t the only player there that feels this way. Fortunately, The Russian team was accompanied by two Russian Esports Federation representatives who have been in touch with the tournament organizers to try and resolve the issues. Representatives from the other teams likely did the same.

The International Esports Federation or IeSF was established on August 11, 2008, to promote and legitimize esports across the globe. This year’s edition of the World Championship is the 11th iteration but risks damaging the organization’s reputation. The tournament began on December 11 and scheduled to end on the 15th.